The Most Dangerous Thing (10 page)

Less than a week after Chicken George gave Gwen a sheet and dried her clothes by his fire, he disappeared again. And this time, he seemed to be
gone
gone—his cupboards bare, the line empty of wash, the chickens pecking at our ankles in a newfound desperation, but we had no feed to give them. You couldn’t say the place was clean. It would never be clean. But it was neat, emptied out. Even Chicken George knew that an era had ended. The five of us stopped going to his cabin.

But Gwen and Sean still went. All summer long, they slipped away to that cabin, never dreaming that anyone was watching them.

Chapter Thirteen

“A
nd he—” Giggle.

The sentence and the giggle ends before Tim comes through the swinging door into the kitchen and confronts three sets of round, blue eyes. Round with innocence, which, he’s pretty sure, is fake. But also round with cold, if such a thing were possible, like the mass-manufactured ice found at buffets. His daughters have taken to regarding him with round, cold eyes these days, as if by widening them they could empty them of all hints, all clues to their existence and inner thoughts. However, he is pretty sure that their thoughts run something like this:
boys boys boys boys shoes boys.
And maybe, although he hopes not,
partying,
although he is unclear if partying is simply a by-product, a place to wear shoes and find boys, or if the partying is the destination, the boys and shoes the vehicles. Even the littlest one, only eight, is in on the act. They are three of a kind, thick as thieves. Identical blue eyes, long blond hair, worn straight and parted down the middle, heart-shaped and heartbreaking faces.

“Good morning,” he says. He knows better—now—than to ask about the interrupted, overheard comment. He knows not to ask anything. Move along, nothing to see here. His daughters remind him of the salamanders he and his brother hunted at the old springhouse. Salmon pink with tiny spots, they were easy enough to see in the clear, rushing water. But to grab one—almost impossible. Only Go-Go had been quick enough, and even he could never hold on to the little buggers. Tim can observe his daughters, but he can’t hold them, not anymore.

“Can I have the car today?” asks the oldest, Michelle. “I have to go to Mary’s.”

“I was going to play golf.” He is careful not to say no immediately, to offer the reason before the rejection. The mere sound of that syllable,
no,
seems to drive his daughters insane, triggering horrible pouting rages. Instead he tries to let them work their way toward
no
through inference. If he has a golf date, it stands to reason he will need the car for a good chunk of the day. Certainly his daughters can figure that out.

“Can’t one of your friends take you?” Michelle counters.

He wants to say the same thing back to her. But, no—be Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am: “My tee time is at eleven
A.M
.”

“I don’t need the car until one,” Michelle says.

“And she could drop me at the movies, then pick me up on the way home,” says Lisa, the middle girl. He waits to see if the baby, Karen, is going to throw herself on the pile, a little pyramid of daughters he will then be forced to knock over with his unfathomable cruelty, his desire to use his own car on his day off. How could he? He is the meanest daddy in the whole wide world. Until recently, he would have given them the car, found another way. He used to believe that if he said yes to all the easy things, the girls would be grateful and well behaved.

Then he saw the much-too-old-for-her boy—twenty, twenty-one?—dropping Michelle off on a Saturday morning, when she was supposedly returning from a sleepover at Mary’s.
Who was that?
he asked, struggling to keep his voice casual.
Oh, Mary’s older brother. He was nice enough to bring me home early when I said I didn’t feel good. The smell of pancakes made me want to vomit.

He and Arlene waited until all the girls were out of the house, then tossed Michelle’s room. They found the birth control pills beneath a pile of bras, filmy insubstantial things that didn’t look up to the task of harnessing his daughter’s frighteningly developed breasts. But neither he nor Arlene was sure what to do next. Obviously, they couldn’t take the pills because Michelle would probably stop using them, possibly fulfill her unspoken ambition to be picked for MTV’s
Teen Moms
. Yet if they confronted her, what would they say?
You can’t have sex? You can’t use birth control? You can have sex and use birth control, but we have to be part of the decision?
Tim doesn’t want any part of his daughter’s sex life. He wants his daughter not to have a sex life. Is that so much to ask?

They were still trying to figure out what to do about Michelle when the mother of Lisa’s best friend called. They had discovered a joint in her daughter’s room, and the daughter said it was Lisa’s, that she let her hide her “stash” there. The two sets of parents talked to the girls alone, then together. They played good cop, bad cop. They threatened, cajoled. And those two little teenyboppers turned out to be tougher than the most hardened career criminals that Tim could imagine. And Tim, as an assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore County, knows from hardened career criminals. He blames
Law & Order.
Everybody is too fucking savvy these days. When he tried to tell the girls that he could send the joint to the crime lab and figure out which one of them had smoked it, Lisa’s friend, Dani, said blandly, “There’s a huge backup. Plus, our DNA isn’t on file, and I’m not letting you swab my cheek unless you get a court order.”

He decided to believe his own daughter. Why would a non-drug user let someone stash drugs in her home, especially a hard little number like this Dani, a fleshy, unattractive girl who has trouble written all over her? That gut on her was probably the result of pot-inspired munchies. It was a weird thing, maybe a trick of memory, but teenage girls these days seemed fatter to Tim. Either really fat or a little too slender, his daughters falling in the second camp. It kills him, when he does the laundry, to see how tiny their clothes are, and not just the baby’s, as they secretly still think of Karen. The tiny underwear, which wouldn’t hold one of Arlene’s ass cheeks even in her college days, the little T-shirts, the narrow blue jeans. Anyway, this Dani is bad news. The two sets of parents decided to keep the girls apart for a while, see what transpired. The other parents got custody of the joint. Tim wondered if they had smoked it. They looked a little unsavory, those parents.

Michelle having sex. Lisa maybe smoking pot, or friends with a stoner. He wonders what Karen has up her sleeve. Only eight, one of those drunken mistakes that married couples make on their anniversary nights, she should be Daddy’s little angel, years away from breaking his heart. But with Michelle and Lisa as her role models, she is clearly ready to raise some hell as soon as she figures out how. Just last week, he caught her playing a kissing game with a neighborhood boy. Only kissing, not doctor, but
still
. He wishes, not for the first time, that St. Lawrence was still open for business, that he could send his girls to a school where the nuns knew how to terrify children into behaving. But the problem isn’t that his old parish school has closed. There are, after all, other parish schools, although fewer of them each year, thanks to the financial troubles that never end for the archdiocese. No, he needs his girls to go to his school in the past. Circa 1950 might work.

“Girls have always had sex,” Arlene said when he confided his retro fantasy. “The difference is that they used to get pregnant and ruin their lives.”

“Really? Where were all those girls when I was seventeen?”

Arlene laughed, punched his arm, assuming he was joking. But Tim was a virgin at seventeen, which wasn’t unheard of in 1979, although kind of a torture when you thought your younger brother was getting it.

The summer Sean and Gwen started going together, Tim had been obsessed with their sex life. It was weird, given that she was not quite fourteen and Sean was fifteen, but his imagination had been inflamed by the possibility they were doing it. He decided they must be doing it because Sean never wanted to talk to him about it. He tried to follow them when they escaped to the woods in the afternoons and weekends, even agreed to drive them to the mall and attend the same matinees, in hopes of seeing what they did with—and to—each other. But they mainly watched the movie, attempting no intimacy greater than sharing popcorn.

Once, however, he stumbled on them by accident, down in his family’s basement, a room marooned somewhere between its utilitarian origins and his mother’s dream of a rec room. The dream basically began and ended with a plaid sofa, carted down there after his mother bought a new living room set. Tim had been in the walk-in pantry, searching the metal shelves for an air pump when he heard them come in. He stilled himself, waiting to see—or at least hear—what they did alone. He hadn’t done it himself yet and he was dying to see someone do it, even if it was Sean and Gwen. He waited for what felt like ten, fifteen minutes, listening to their whispered giggles, then the long silences. “Oh,” Gwen kept saying in a soft breathy exhale. “Oh.” They had to be doing it. He allowed himself to creep up to the door, crouching so he would be eye level with the old sofa. To his disappointment, they were sitting side by side, kissing very softly, lightly. His brother took his time. No, his brother wasn’t even trying to make a move. Although he had his hands inside Gwen’s shirt, he wasn’t trying to go any further. To Tim’s amazement, it was Gwen who seemed to be moving things forward. She pulled away from Sean, but it was to lift her top. Wow, she was pretty built for her age. Tim raised his head slightly to get a better view and his elbow struck something on the shelves by the door. It wasn’t a big noise, but it was enough.

“What was that?” Gwen asked. “Your mom?”

“She’s not home,” Sean said, but he was helping Gwen back into her shirt, buttoning it, leading her out of the basement. He seemed almost relieved by the interruption.

That night, as they were drifting to sleep, Sean said suddenly: “Tim, were you in the basement today?”

“What?” He felt like there was an appropriate level of surprise in his tone. Surprise, but nonchalance. He shouldn’t be shocked by the question, or indignant in his innocence. If he hadn’t been there, if he had no context, he would find the question odd, nothing more.

“Were you in the basement this afternoon?”

“I went down there to get the bicycle pump. My tires were flat. I think Go-Go’s been riding my bike. Have you seen him?”

“No.” He could tell Sean was frustrated. But he couldn’t follow up without tipping his hand. “Where was Go-Go today, anyway?”

“He was with that new friend, Billy or something. He goes to his house.”

“So Go-Go wasn’t around this afternoon?”

“I don’t think so.” Tim smiled in the dark. If Go-Go had been lurking in the basement, he would have made far more noise, probably jumped on Sean and Gwen, tried to join in the
game
they were playing. Go-Go knew how babies were made, technically, but he didn’t think it had anything to do with him. It was just something stupid that parents did.

As they fell asleep, Tim was pretty sure that Sean was whacking off. Lord knows, he was, and thinking about Gwen, although he felt a little pervy about it. Only thirteen, and his brother’s girlfriend. If he were to confess such things—and he never did—he wondered what the priest would find more egregious, the girl’s age or the covetousness. Not to mention all the impure thoughts backed up behind his desire for his brother’s girlfriend. The thing was, he didn’t want Gwen, not really. Mickey, maybe, but there was something about Mickey that scared him a little. He wanted a girlfriend. He had one at camp, last summer, and it was frustrating when they didn’t get to go back because he was pretty sure that he and Anne would have worked their way up to all sorts of things. Then his dad had to go and lose his job, and Tim lost his chance to get laid.

Tim was a virgin until senior prom, when his date seemed to assume that giving it up was virtually required, and he did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But she wasn’t special. He met Arlene freshman year of college, however, and she was. Pretty and bubbly and in love with him, and he still can’t quite get over that fact.

When their girls arrived, Michelle and Lisa practically on top of each other, then Karen after a long pause, almost everyone made the same two observations. One: they were spaced out just like the Halloran boys, with only twelve months between the first two and then six years, a daddy-got-lucky baby. Then everyone added: “But girls are easier.” Really?
Really?
He looks at the three girls clustered together on the padded banquette in their breakfast nook and has to wonder. Sure, Go-Go broke their mother’s heart, driving into that Jersey wall, almost assuredly drunk after another failed attempt at sobriety. Go-Go had broken her heart over and over. With the first divorce and then the separation, which had led to the estrangement from her two grandbabies. Six grandchildren and only one boy, and of course it would be Sean who produced the much-beloved grandson, another chip-off-the-oh-so-wonderful block. When the families gather—rare, because Sean’s wife and her family have a stranglehold on Sean, and the distance is not insignificant—Duncan appears to be every bit as perfect as Sean, a dark and contained little soldier among his fluffy blond cousins. When they were younger, Tim’s girls had fussed over Duncan, but now Michelle and Lisa say he is stuck-up and boring. “Yeah, he makes his parents proud, with his straight A’s and cross-country running and jazz band, what a dipshit,” Tim wants to say. He doesn’t, though.

Aware of his daughters’ glares—even the little one is eye-fucking him and he hasn’t done shit to ruin her day—he hoists his golf bag over his shoulder and heads out to his car.
His
car, goddammit. He is entitled to take his car to the golf course on his day off, to have a little relaxation after working hard all week to buy their shoes and their criminally tiny T-shirts and whatever else they want. Isn’t he? But already he is thinking about dinner, concocting a plan that will make things up to them, assuming they will even deign to spend the evening with him and Arlene. Did he shut his parents out at that age? Of course he did. But his parents wanted to be shut out, whereas Arlene and Tim flutter around their children, courting them, wooing them. In some ways, he is still a hopeless seventeen-year-old, trying to win the approving glance of a teenage girl, no matter how fleeting.

Maybe pizza will win him some points. From the good place, which he thinks is Fortunato’s. He better check with Arlene, though. Fortunato’s was the good pizza place last month, but things change so quickly.